Video 5:17
Dogs threaten Plover survival

The Hooded Plover bird is getting a helping hand from the Fleurieu Peninsula community, south of Adelaide, by educating people and dog owners to stay away from their nests on the beach.

Transcript

IAN HENSCHKE, PRESENTER: Here is a story about the plight of plovers, which most people only think of when they're swooped by the notorious masked lap wing plover. Well fortunately there are more polite plovers about, but as Leah MacLennan discovered that breed on the Fleurieu Peninsula faces a battle for survival and that's where local communities and school children are trying the to help out.

LEAH MACLENNAN, REPORTER: Visiting a South Australian beach, you might do a spot of bird watching, so to speak. If you're really lucky, you may catch a glimpse of the hooded plover, or you could say the hooded plover would be the lucky one.

TONY FLAHERTY, ADEL. AND MT LOFTY RANGES NRM BOARD: The birds themselves are very well camouflaged and so are the eggs and the chicks. The nest is just a scrape in the sand above the high water mark and most people probably wouldn't even notice it. But the problems is: if people are walking past, the birds notice the people, so they'll stay off the nest.

LEAH MACLENNAN: Tony Flaherty is from the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges natural resource management board. He's leading a team that's trying to protect the hooded plover. He says there's only about 800 of the birds in South Australia. And last season only 14 breeding pairs were spotted on the Fleurieu Peninsula. Mr Flaherty says they're nesting sites make them particularly vulnerable.

TONY FLAHERTY: They plovers have to contend with a lot of things. Things like high tides, and there are natural predators - and introduced predators, and also things like seagulls and ravens. But what's happened: just like - they like to use the beaches and the hooded plovers nest on the beach above the high-tide mark and beaches are a place where other families like to gather.

LEAH MACLENNAN: If a nesting hooded plover is disturbed, its defence strategy is to draw the predator away from its nest. The problem with that strategy is people using the beach can unknowingly get too close to the nests, forcing the plovers to stay away for long periods of time.

TONY FLAHERTY: If the adult birds are off the nest for too long that means that the eggs can cook in the sun. The other thing is: the birds, when the chicks hatch, they start feeding right away and they need a bit of space to start feeding. If there are people and dogs on the beach right up close, then the chicks just freeze and that means they'll stay camouflaged, their exposed to predators and they don't feed as much.

LEAH MACLENNAN: That's why the natural resource management board is setting up signs and barriers to alert people to the presence of nesting plovers. It's also enlisting the help of volunteers like Ashley Read.

ASHLEY READ, VOLUNTEER: A couple of years ago my wife and I started walking along the beaches here and we noticed the plovers and unfortunately we kept seeing them - you'd see them either nesting or with chicks and then a few days later the chicks had gone. So we started to think what's had happened to these poor things, 'cause they're charismatic little fellas and it was sad to see that they were having very little success with their nesting.

LEAH MACLENNAN: Mr Read now regularly walks along this peach at Port Willunga. He's able to identify plover nests and report their activities to the NRM board.

ASHLEY READ: It's lovely to be on the beaches at this time of year anyhow. I mean, it's a lovely place to be out and the sea is just overwhelming here. And it's very easy to do. It's not a difficult task. The birds, once you get to know where they are and where to look for them are quite easy to find and anyone can do it with a little bit of training.

LEAH MACLENNAN: At the Yankalilla Area School, students are getting in on the conservation effort. These children are making shelters so that when chicks hatch they'll have somewhere to get away from predators and the hot sun.

SAM BURTON, YANKALILLA AREA SCHOOL: What we're doing is protecting their eggs so that they don't get attacked and so they can rebreed, and like there's not many left in Australia, so we can protect them so they can rehatch and breed again and the cycle continues.

RYAN FISHER, YANKALILLA AREA SCHOOL: I reckon they're little cute creatures and we really want to protect them so then the life in Australia, they can keep building up and there'll be more of them.

LEAH MACLENNAN: Sophie Piron from the Natural Resource Centre at Normanville is helping the students with their project. She stays biggest part of conservation is raising awareness about the hooded plover and its nesting habits. Ms Piron says it's especially important that dog owners know to keep their pets away from plover nests. She says even if the dog isn't attacking the birds it can still cause major problems.

SOPHIE PIRON, NORMANVILLE NATURAL RESOURCES CENTRE: That's a comment that a lot of people do make, they say, "My dog's not interested in birds. It doesn't chase them, so what's the problem?" But what happens is that it's not really about the dog a lot of time, it's about the birds. They get a little bit worried that dog might be a threat to them or especially a threat to their eggs or to their chicks.

ASHLEY READ: What we're trying to do is make people aware that hooded plovers from about August through to January, February, through the summer months, are nesting on the beach, and if people can avoid disturbing the nests, that really helps the survival of the chicks to make sure that these birds will be around in the future.